and his work of this period, as it hung in rows upon the walls, suggested the streets of an undestroyed Pompeii. Continuing through the exhibition at a leisurely pace, we penetrated at length to the innermost core of the museum, which was developing a Piranesian complexity: at one point a gangway crawled along a wall while a show of Helmut Newton photographs incongruously intersected a group of Hélion's paintings. The artist by now seemed tired; several friends with whom he'd arrived were appearing in our vicinity wIth protective regularity. It would soon be rush hour, they hinted benevolently, and Hélion lived a good hour from Paris-at Bigeon- nette, near Chartres. I felt a vague oppression, and not simply because a pleasant conversation was drawing to an end. Despite his failing eyesight, Hélion had relived, even reseen, his paintings: he obviously possessed them prodigiously in his mind's eye. Yet because he had once endowed them with the attributes of life they had also escaped him, as creatures do escape their creators, and gone out to join the world. How much, I asked myself, could I follow Hélion into the realm of symbolic correspondences he'd con- jured up? Of course, I could follow him all the way; yet also not a step. What artist had ever really proved a reliable guide to the meanings gener- ated by his work? And could anybody, in the end, decipher the riddle of these hat-doffing, newspaper-reading, ciga- rette-smoking city slickers? Hélion seemed to be overinterpreting himself, reading his paintings as if they were hieroglyphs; I'd never expected to hear an art- ist do this. But certain of his aesthetic reflec- / tions had matured under ' . ........................................... the threat of death, and .............,.,.....l. ...............:......,.. perhaps he had reached for the objects about JH J h f h fJA '4 im as i t ey were '. '4rCfUC.....f......I.c.n..'u......."..n..\lJP !J anchors and portents. .. Sometimes, though, when one least expected it, he would revert to the abstract way of thil}king. In one of his paintings, the "A Re- bours," of 1947, he had juxtaposed the figures of a painter and an upside-down female model. The inversion fascinated me: it showed that his vocabulary had a place for the tumbled and the fallen. Yet when I asked him why he had in- verted this nude he casually replied, "Because she becomes abstract, and balances the standing figure well that way; and because her body is so sensual 70 when you see it upside down." I was momentarily taken aback, for the un- settling figure, with her rich tones and her tresses of soft black hair, seemed to be telling me something else: that she was laid out as if for an offering, and that in her offering, as in every volup- tuous act, there was some element of catastrophic sacrifice. This was a fleet- ing and perhaps overpersonal intui- tion, but it was something that the painting was most assuredly suggest- ing to me at that moment; I didn't feel inclined to let it go. I walked with Hélion and his friends out onto the Avenue du Prési- dent Wilson. As we shook hands, he invited me to come out in a day or two and have a look at his recent work, in the studio at Bigeonnette. AFTER Hélion's departure, I re- .n. turned to the museum to study his paintings of the fifties, which we'd barely had time to glance at. Dispersed for many years, they were first shown in a body by his dealer , Karl Flinker, in the summer. of 1984. At that time, I had chanced into Fli '1ker' s gallery, in the Rue de T ournon, and had at once been fascinated by what I saw. These pictures are far more realistic than Hé- lion's other work, but it isn't their realism that makes them so good. It is, rather, I believe, their revelation of an exceptional readiness of empirical re- sponse to the solemn ugliness of every- day surroundings. There's a still-life feel to most of them, even though they aren't an technically still-lifes. Curi- ously, Hélion turns the genre to social ends. "My still-lifes," he says in one of his diaries, "are like theatre intermissions during which my ob- j ects usurp, in their own way and always comically, the players' roles. The people have all gone off to drink, or to make love or :r.otiV t'. war, and the objects invade their space. . . It is really the people who are 'still.' " These pictures are rendered in a dry, explicit manner, rather like commer- cial illustrations, and the crowded sur- faces threaten at any moment to take on a dull, actuarial density. At first, you might think that Hélion is indulg- ing in a lot of humbugging illustra- tors' tricks, but soon you realize that he's simply bringing a fondness for the commonplace grit of execution into alignment with the crass visual evidence he feels compelled to set ( _. , - JANUARY 6,1986 forth. For these pictures are testimony of a highly personal order. He looks out into his big, bleak, windowless studio in the Avenue de l'Observatoire and tries to make sense of a tableful of junk half-devoured by the encroaching gloom. Cigarette butts and holes in the wall vie as points of obsession; under the dirty skylight any stray model at once acquires owl eyes and a mustache of shadow. Occasionally, the artist looks into a mirror and paints himself. He is well into middle age; he has had his first heart attack; no one in Paris will show his work. "Decidedly, all has been lost," says his diary for this period; yet he is surprised by how hungry he is. His paintings disclose a fascination with the humblest things in his pur- view: he almost wants to gobble up the beautiful greasy light on the floor and make it part of himself. Odd things obsess him: he does a whole nude in one breezy day and spends a month fiddling with her shadow. He feels silly, and his hunger grows. Then he begins a food still-life that turns into a love tryst. There are marguerites and a bottle of Rhône wine on the floor, and the tea things and peaches and sardines have been hurriedly aban- doned in the midst of mounting desire. A lacy chemise has thrown itself upon a pair of pants. The emerging image is unambiguously personal but not confessional or anecdotal. Sexuality is not the content but the form of the tale. Sex discloses itself as a kind of near-symmetry-the difference be- tween men's and women's buttons- and the half-eaten food gangs up to ape the topology of seduction: the con- cavities and the convexities of it, the ins and the outs. In the foreground, the pants open their big mouth and stick out a ragged white tongue of a pocket. During his period of ostracism, only a few artists visited Hélion. Balthus came by loyally, as did Matta and Victor Brauner and Alberto Gia- cometti. One day, Giacometti in- troduced him to the poet Francis Pongee Ponge, who soon became one of Hélion's closest friends, had written a book of prose poems called "Le Parti Pris des Choses" ( "The Voice of Things"), in which he spoke of the "passion" of cigarettes and the "mad- ness" of water and the pleasure of holding a door in one's arms. Like Hé- lion, he delighted in shells and shell- like structures, and often seemed overwhelmed by the world's provender of material incident. He was especially